


Safe and Sound

by Anselion



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: 1 comes out, 24 go in, F/F, F/M, M/M, No Such thing as Peace, Post Mockingjay Rebllion, Seventeen years later, The Games, ocs all around
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-10
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:08:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21753505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anselion/pseuds/Anselion
Summary: “There’s no such thing as peace,” I sneer into the water, ignoring the heat rippling off the other. “They wanted us to suffer, for things we had no part in, and now we are. There is nothing else to be said about it. They’re hypocrites and we will forever be stuck on this wheel of kill or be killed, enslave or be enslaved.” I didn’t stop to see the effect my words would have, if they would have any, and turned on my heels to head bark towards the cornucopia.
Relationships: Haymitch Abernathy/Johanna Mason, Katniss Everdeen/Peeta Mellark
Kudos: 3





	Safe and Sound

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you all for taking to time to read this! This is my first Hunger Games Fic and I am excited to be showing it to you! Safe and Sound takes place seventeen years after the Mockinjay Rebellion. Gone are the Hunger Games, and in their place are just “The Games”. The Capitol is now experiencing the fear and brutality Snow inflicted on the districts — but there is no Mockingjay to fight for their freedom of this oppression. Or, is there?

I.

I knew it in the same way I knew the sun would rise and fall every day — there was nothing peaceful about peace. For as long as there has been civilization, there has been strife, it is human nature to hate and punish. It didn’t matter if the punished were the ones who deserved it or not. 

There would never be a war that was one that didn’t end with one side still hating and punishing the other. The war just seventeen years ago was proof enough of that. I was just a baby, born three days before the fall of the Capitol, and still today could be the final day of my free life because of him. 

The air is cold as I find my way from the bare threads covering a mattress with more spring than padding. Alder sleeps soundly across the room, shaggy copper hair scattered hazardously across a pillow; Cypress is pressed into his chest, the toddlers slop if identical tangles barely peeking out from the old blanket covering them both. 

At the foot of the bed lays Aspen, his wrist bent awkwardly against the floor — I don’t need to see the other side of the bed to know his legs are nearly touching the floor. I could never hope to understand the way he sleeps that way, but so long as he got some I wouldn’t say anything. The three of us will have our names in the reaping this year. Alder and I will have our names in thirty-three times each today, the thought brings a chill scurrying up my spine. 

With the removal of President Coriolanus Snow, The Hunger Games — which have since been shortened to just “The Games”— we’re suppose to have been abolished. And perhaps they might have been had it not been for the ‘slight’ of tongue by one Johanna Mason to the new President Paylor about be intentions of the other Victors and the deceased Alma Coin. The vote had been left to the people. The people cried for blood — the blood of the children of the Capitol. The blood of children not their own. The blood they had just been fighting to stop from flowing any longer. 

They were hypocrites, the lot of them. Disgusting hypocrites who were just repeating the mistakes of a tyrant they claimed to have hated and yet turned into the moment they were given the chance. 

I swing my legs over the side of the bed, feet slipping instinctively into the faded leather boots I had traded one of our mother’s fancy dresses for two years ago, right after her death. They had been too large back then, but now the hugged my feet snuggly. The trousers are loose, an old pair the Alder had outgrown a few years back when he hit the first growth spurt of puberty. The shirt was a better fit, the sleeves reaching the heel of my palms before being rolled carefully to the crook of my elbows to give me better range of movement. I grabbed the basket tucked beneath the table, and dropped the strap of my bag across my shoulder before moving out the door, long before the sun had even peeked over the horizon. 

After the Rebels won the war, everyone expected people to trickle back to their districts now that the country was under the capable hands of a new leader. That didn’t happen. Some did, sure, but families also swarmed to the capital for a better way of life, ignoring that just moving didn’t make for a better life. With each more “suitable” family, as the new leader called them, moving in meant there was less room for the Capitol citizens who had made their homes there years before. Slowly citizens were pushed from their homes and into the districts. My family was one of those. 

I rubbed at my wrist absently. The black ‘C’ that identified my as a Capitol Citizen had been placed there three months after Paylor rose to power. Each Citizen now had the think cursive font marred into their flesh. Given to every newborn and senior — it started as a way to tell the now plainly dressed citizens apart from the district citizens, now it served as a way to keep track of us as we were scattered across the nation. 

There were only forty eight of us in the freshly reconstructed District Twelve, out of the two thousand and ninety six residents. I hated it here, and no amount of time would change that. Like many before him, my father’s life was taken in the mines when I was fourteen. Grief took our mother six months later. Now at seventeen, Alder and I were all that stood between starvation and the younger two. 

“Kory,” Colton greets me with the single word. My name is Hickory — apparently a naming trend followed Katniss Everdeen’s win of the 74th Hunger Games. Our parents, however, decided trees were a better theme than flowers and the like. Colton was quiet in a way I could never stop appreciating. Conversations could flow freely or we could sit in companionable silence for hours, nothing was ever forced or strained — that was a rarity given he was District Twelve through and through, from the hair dark as the coal of the mines to the Seam gray eyes. He lifts a line of fishing wire with a curious tilt of his head, that black hair falling slightly into his eyes. He would need a hair cut soon, I wasn’t sure why he had let it grow or this long, it had never been before. “We can take it easy for a few hours before the Reaping.”

Sometimes it was hard not to hate the other — he didn’t know the fear my brothers and I would struggle through today. But that was the point I suppose. Capitol citizens would now have to learn the fear Snow had forced onto the Districts for Seventy five years now. 

Fishing was never my strong suit, and after nearly half a day of it, I have four fish to his eleven. We sell five of them and divide the remaining ten between us along with some of the herbs I had collected on the way back. I trade a mink’s pelt for a new pair of shoes for Aspen, who at fourteen was growing out of all his things but still too small to take what Alder no longer could wear. A Rabbit goes to the baker who gives me two loaves of bread and a cookie for little Cypress who could make even the most battle worn soldiers smile and indulge in his babbling. 

The three are up and dressed by the time I return to the old, barely standing home our father had purchased when we moved here. Aspen is grumbling beneath his breath, and still is when I return to the main room in a pale green dress that reaches my knees. “Remember, only Alder and I will take the Tesserae. Between us both, we will have plenty to keep us fed for a while,” I remind him, smoothing his hair down flat in the back as he finishes buttoning his shirt. Alder and I had been entered for the tesserae since we were twelve — really one of us could have done it and we would be find, but the trouble was either of us allowing the other to take that burden and neither of us were willing to do that, so in the end we both did. 

At One O’clock, we head for the square. Much as it was in the past, viewing is mandatory unless too ill to do so. Cypress was passed to Colton and his family who regarded the other three of us with barely concealed sympathy. It made my blood boil. If they were so sympathetic, why were they not petitioning to end these games for us as well? 

I find myself standing beside the thirteen other girls — there weren’t enough Capitol children here to section us off by age really. The boys aren’t much better with their eighteen. The screen over the stage fills with static before bursting to life with the deafening history of Panem and the Rebellion, and then Katniss Everdeen is taking the stage with Haymitch Abernathy and the Mayor. The words are always the same, I heard once that they were the same words the mayor had recited for The Hunger Games reapings too.

There is no Capitol escort now though, it’s a soldier who steps forward, face deceptively blank and face relaxed and calm. “Ladies first,” I hear the echo of the chirp from Haymich, though only just barely, the microphone just barely picking up the words — I don’t miss the sarcastic roll of his eyes or the humorless twitch of Katniss’ lips.

It isn’t until thirteen other sets of eyes fall on me that I realize a name has been called. And it’s mine.

**Author's Note:**

> Please be sure to leave a review to let me know what you think! I apologize for any spelling or grammatical errors, I am typing these chapters out on my phone and Autocorrect is not as smart as it seems to think it is!


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